I like the idea of the lightning network. I think the developers behind it are very smart and it’s a very clever use of Bitcoin contracts. I’m sure that whatever comes from it will be useful to some parts of the Bitcoin ecosystem at a minimum. What I’m not for, however, is prematurely deprecating critical parts of bitcoin (zeroconf transactions and low transaction fees) when it’s not yet clear that the lightning network will be a viable replacement for them. Yet that’s what the core developers seems bent on doing.

We know that lightning is at least technically feasible. We don’t know if it’s economically feasible or even a desirable alternative. Will it be a decentralized peer-to-peer payment layer or will it end up as a quasi-centralized payment network similar modern banking? We don’t know the answer to this question and probably wont know until we see it in action. Which is why it comes across as irresponsible to go “all-in” on lightning at this point.

My main concern from the beginning was that, as a hub-and-spoke payment layer, there would be very few hubs and the network would be quasi-centralized and a regulatory sitting duck. It seems I wasn’t the only one with this concern as there’s been a fairly recent pivot away from the hub-and-spoke network topology to a more organic, wallet-to-wallet routing. The network is now envisioned as a more pure p2p payment layer without those large scale payment hubs.

Certainly this has to be viewed as a promising development as it begins to address my primary concern. Unfortunately, I find this view of the lightning network overly optimistic. In what follows I will give a lightning network overview and some reasons why I think it’s likely the network will end up with the hub-and-spoke topology anyway.

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